lfnfandomcom-20200216-history
Forum:LFN vs Interlingua
Sorry, this post is in English. I am trying to decide whether to try to learn LFN or Interlingua. I looked on the LFN website, but I only saw a brief mention that LFN is more "regular" than Interlingua, without any details. The best information I found was on this wiki page. Could I see some examples of the irregularities in Interlingua and how LFN fixes them? Maybe this information can be added to the wiki page. If I may, I would like to offer two suggestions: 1) The website http://www.lingua-franca-nova.net/ needs to be updated. Most external links are broken, including the link to contact Stefan Fisahn. I would also remove the link to the Yahoo Group and encourage visitors to come here, to Wikia, instead (I had a lot of problems registering, and clearly the community has moved to Wikia anyway). *Hi, Daniel. Sad to say, that is not our website! I unwittingly neglected to pay the fee for the domain many years ago, and it got snatched up by someone. Why they would want it is beyond me. The original homepage is at http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/lfn/ . I haven't looked at it in a while, so some of it is probably out-of-date. If you or anyone reading this knows how to deal with the website you mention, please let me know. jorj **I just looked into it. The domain seems to be owned by cybersquatters - people who buy domains they have no intention of using in the hopes of selling it back to the original owners at an extortionist price. You could consider buying lingua-franca-nova.org right now (available) and decide later if you want to use it. For the moment, I have contacted the owner of omniglot.com and asked him to correct the links. Unfortunately, Omniglot is the second highest hit for LFN on Google (after Wikipedia) and so they are probably the main source of traffic being directed to the cybersquatters and to the now defunct forum at phpbb3now. Daniel **Good advice. Thanks! Simon ***I recommend buying both lingua-franca-nova.org and lingua-franca-nova.info and using the former to redirect to the latter. It is not very expensive. In fact, I am tempted to buy them myself, but they should belong to a more long-time user and not the guy who arrived last Tuesday and doesn't speak LFN yet. Daniel. ***It's for Jorj to decide. He owns the language – he should own the domains. Simon ***only jorj hasn't the faintest idea of how to get a domain! (the other one was gotten for me by someone else - the stephan you mentioned above). so: tell me how. jorj ****Go to https://directnic.com and on the search box, enter (for example) lingua-franca-nova.info and press Enter. They will search that name, tell you if it is available (it is) and also offer similar names (e.g. ".org"). The .info name costs $9/year and the .org costs $15/year. There are many companies that will broker a domain name for you (that's what they are, brokers, intermediaries). I have used DirectNic for several years without trouble. When my domains are close to expiring they always send me reminders and otherwise don't bother me. :::::: You will have to create an account with them, from which you can manage your domains. They will surely offer to also sell you a web hosting service. That's the service where they hold the actual files that make up your website. I have never used DirectNic for that, but I have no reason to think that they are bad. I just had a quick look and their plans are entirely reasonable (pretty standard). If you pick them for hosting, the Lite plan should be more than enough. :::::: One good thing to know is that the web hosting is entirely independent of the ownership of the domain. If later you decide you don't like their hosting service, you can move it to another company. So this is not a choice one has to stress about. Daniel 2) On the front page, add a section about learning LFN. The wiki has pages that are relevant to new users, but one has to do a search to find them. The "Learn LFN" section should link to the language comparison page, and give information of where a new user can ask a question (is this forum the correct place?). Daniel *Hi, Daniel. I think you're quite right about the need to update that old website (I'd quite forgotten it existed – probably it should just redirect to here now) and the front page here. I'll leave it to Jorj (LFN's creator) to decide exactly what he wants to do. Regarding irregularities in Interlingua, Wikipedia has a nice article. One simple example is that Interlingua has irregular forms for "better", "best", "worse" and "worst"; LFN doesn't. Interlingua's design favours naturalistic complexity where this appears in enough of its source languages; LFN prefers to simplify as much as possible, aiming for logical derivation of vocabulary alongside naturalistic word forms. Simon *Hi Simon. Thanks! That article was very interesting. I was especially surprised that in Interlingua many letters have different sounds depending on context ("crear" vs "acido" vs "echo" vs "chef"). To me, that means that Interlingua is less universal than LFN, even though it uses more source languages. Interlingua's vocabulary may be broader than LFN, but its spelling phonology certainly is very parochial. Incidentally, I agree that redirecting the old website here is a very good idea. There is a lot of good information in the old website, but that can be easily transferred to the wiki. It is easier to keep the wiki updated. Daniel *Interlingua inherits anything that appears often enough in its source languages, and that includes irregularities and other grammatical convolutions. For me, LFN's consistency of spelling is a great feature, especially coupled with the care that's been taken in selecting aesthetically pleasing word forms: e.g. "strutur", not "structura". Simon **As far as I know, LFN is the only proposed auxiliary that pays any attention to esthetics! It's one of my favorite things - listen to some of Simon's readings for a sense of it. It's even prettier than Italian! jorj **I'm probably missing something. I don't see why "strutur" is more aesthetic than "structura".Daniel **Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But consonant clusters are not only tricky to spell, they're also really hard to pronounce if – as is the case for many people – they don't exist in your native language. The "str-" is of course a cluster, and that's perhaps regrettable, but LFN at least allows speakers to add an initial "e-" to the pronunciation of such words. Consider "aseta", a word that strikes me as being much less clumsy than "acceptar" with its confusing double C. You could argue that "aseta" is less recognisable, but the connection is easy enough to spot if you already know a word like "accept" – and for speakers of non-Indo-European languages, recognisability of the roots is largely irrelevant anyway. Simon **By the way, I've just noticed that Jorj mentioned my readings, but didn't link to them. So: ***Here's a recording of my translation of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe – the audio no longer quite tallies with the written text, because a few minor changes of vocabulary have occurred since I recorded it. The biggest change was the introduction of "lo" to mean "it" – the audio still has "el". ***And here's a more recent recording of a short story called "La bileta de reveni". Simon *I will add to Simon's comments that Interlingua has this odd habit of including two versions of verbal roots - for example, "ager" as a verb and "act" for making nouns and adjectives. Also, it has a full array of pronouns (subject, object, possessive - even some differentiation between direct, indirect, and prepositional pronouns; also male, female, neuter, and common third person gender, in the singular and plural). Finally, let me add to what Simon said about spelling: Interlingua uses the more original latinate forms of words which, though good for English and French speakers, causes much confusion. It keeps double consonants like ll and nn, doubles like ph and f, and the three-way distinction of s, ss, and z. That doesn't help for the speakers of most Romance languages, much less those unfamiliar with western languages at all! jorj **Hmm... I think 80% of my spelling errors in English are due to double consonants. It's just something I never could master. I had no idea that Interlingua had those.Daniel *I like your suggestions, by the way. Perhaps you would like to work on them? :o) **I would be willing to chip in a little. I should probably learn some LFN first though.Daniel